When designing a brand health survey in SurveyMonkey, selecting the right brand equity metrics is the foundation for generating actionable insights. These are the indicators that tell you how your brand is performing in the market over time. The challenge: it’s easy to either include too much and overwhelm respondents or overlook key data points that could impact strategic decisions.

Brand equity encompasses several dimensions – from how well your brand is known, to how much it’s trusted, preferred, and distinct. A good tracker survey measures both awareness and perception, helping you monitor changes and diagnose what’s driving or holding back your brand’s growth.

Start with Core Brand Health Metrics

Here are the baseline metrics every brand tracking survey should include:

• Awareness: Unaided and aided awareness show how top-of-mind your brand is compared to competitors.
• Consideration: How likely is a consumer to consider your brand when they’re ready to purchase?
• Usage: Are people trying or buying your brand? How repeatable is that behavior?
• Preference: When given options, which brand do consumers prefer and why?
• Brand associations: What qualities or values do people link with your brand?

Layer in Diagnostic Metrics

Beyond the basics, go deeper with additional brand equity questions that diagnose why your brand is performing a certain way. SurveyMonkey allows you to easily route responses based on logic, so you can design follow-ups that clarify perceptions without increasing survey length for everyone.

Common diagnostic survey questions include:

• Reputation: How trustworthy or socially responsible is your brand?
• Differentiation: How does your brand stand out from others in your category?
• Value proposition: Does your brand deliver quality or innovation that matters to consumers?

Keep It Consistent Over Time

One of the most important principles in brand tracking is consistency. That means keeping your equity framework largely the same over time, so you can identify trends and shifts in brand perception. You can always add ad hoc questions for campaigns or market events (SurveyMonkey makes that easy), but your core tracker survey should remain stable for reliable benchmarks.

Need Help Choosing Metrics?

If you’re unsure what to measure – or how to word survey questions effectively – working with expert insights professionals through On Demand Talent can help. These are not generic consultants or freelancers. Instead, they’re experienced market research specialists who know how to align DIY tools with strategic brand objectives. They can help set up your initial tracker survey, ensure your metrics are aligned with your goals, and even train your internal team to manage updates confidently over time.

Choosing the right brand equity questions is not just about survey design – it’s about making sure you're asking the questions that matter for growth, differentiation, and relevance in an ever-evolving market.

While metrics like awareness and consideration give you useful snapshots of brand performance, they don’t always tell the full story. Today’s leading brands go beyond functional performance and tap into emotional cues – the feelings, traits, and deeper connections consumers associate with them. This emotional layer of brand tracking is especially important if you want to build not just recognition, but real loyalty.

Why Emotions Matter in Brand Tracking

Emotionally connected customers are more likely to be loyal, recommend your brand to others, and forgive occasional missteps. Measuring this type of connection in your survey can give you critical insight into your brand’s relationship with its audience. For example, do people see your brand as inspiring? Relatable? Trustworthy? Fun? Safe?

SurveyMonkey lets you explore emotional perception through a number of question formats, such as image association grids, rating scales, or word associations. These tools help you uncover how people feel about your brand – not just what they know.

Ideas for Emotional Cue Survey Questions

Here are simple ways you can capture emotional brand attributes in your next survey:

• Emotion association scale: “To what extent does you feel this brand is...” followed by terms like Innovative, Friendly, Confusing, Energetic, etc.
• Word cloud or pick-a-word: Ask respondents to choose up to 3 words from a list that describe your brand best.
• Story-based prompts: “If this brand were a person, what type of personality would they have?” or “How would you describe this brand to a friend?”

These brand perception tools help you go beyond traditional brand equity metrics and monitor how people connect with your brand at a human level. And when tracked over time, they become powerful indicators of brand affinity and health.

Avoid Overcomplicating It

Emotional perception is important, but it should still be kept clear and easy to analyze. Aim to include no more than 5–7 emotional attributes in a given survey to avoid fatigue. Mix them with your functional performance questions, or rotate them quarterly for deeper dives across different attribute sets.

Need Help Interpreting Emotional Data?

If you’re unsure how to craft emotional survey questions, or how to turn fuzzy qualitative responses into something that drives better business decisions, SIVO’s On Demand Talent team can help. These professionals can guide you in framing emotional metrics clearly, analyzing open-text data, and making sure emotional cues are understood in the broader brand context. Instead of guessing what makes your brand memorable or engaging, you’ll have the evidence to build more resonant messaging, positioning, and strategies – all without sacrificing the agility of DIY research.

In short, emotional metrics help you understand not just what people think of your brand – but why they care about it. And when paired with the right brand equity questions, these insights can drive powerful brand-building decisions.

Once you’ve identified how people feel about your brand and what they believe it stands for, the next step in your brand tracking survey is to explore why people think and behave the way they do. That’s the core purpose of diagnostic questions – to uncover what’s driving performance across brand attributes, touchpoints, and consumer expectations.

In SurveyMonkey, diagnostic questions are your opportunity to break apart the “what” and get to the “why.” These questions help determine what’s working, what needs improvement, and how your brand stacks up against competitors. When done well, they transform raw data from your tracker survey into actionable insights.

Key Areas to Explore Through Diagnostic Questions

• Brand Drivers: What attributes, features, or benefits matter most to consumers – and how well is your brand delivering on them?
• Usage & Experience: How often do consumers interact with your brand? What moments (both digital and physical) shape their impression?
• Barriers to Preference: What’s stopping non-users from engaging with or choosing your brand over others?
• Competitive Assessment: How do consumers perceive your brand relative to key competitors on important dimensions like trust, innovation, or affordability?

To get these answers, you’ll want to include a mix of:

• Scalable rating questions (e.g., “How well does the brand perform on [X]?”)
• Open-text questions that allow for qualitative depth (e.g., “What could this brand do better?”)
• Forced choice questions where consumers pick the brand that best represents certain qualities

For example, a fictional outdoor gear brand might ask: “Which of these values do you associate most with [Brand X]?” and follow up with, “Why did you choose that value?” That 1–2 punch helps clarify both perception and reasoning behind it – strengthening your diagnostic framework.

The best way to track brand performance is by keeping your diagnostic questions consistent across waves while allowing room for small iterations based on trends or new strategic priorities. Try not to overload each survey wave; instead, rotate in-depth diagnostics over time to avoid fatigue while maintaining data quality.

As DIY market research tools like SurveyMonkey make brand health tracking more accessible, strong diagnostics separate surface-level data from strategic insight. With purposeful question design, even small teams can unlock nuanced stories about what’s driving their brand perception over time.

SurveyMonkey offers an intuitive platform for DIY brand tracking – ideal for teams managing tight budgets, fast timelines, or evolving research needs. But to get the most from its functionality, it helps to think strategically from setup to launch. Here’s how to make SurveyMonkey work harder for your brand health study.

Start with a Clear Brand Measurement Framework

Before touching a survey template, define the scope of your tracker. What specific metrics do you want to monitor? Common brand equity metrics in surveys include awareness, consideration, preference, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Add to that emotional touchpoints and diagnostic questions, and you’re setting up a well-rounded tracker that evolves with your brand's needs.

SurveyMonkey’s logic settings and branching tools let you build sophisticated flows – helping you ask relevant questions to the right respondent segments. For example, you can ask loyal brand users about their expectations and satisfaction, while asking non-users about perceived barriers or missed connections.

Take Advantage of Templates and Customization

SurveyMonkey’s brand measurement templates offer a helpful starting point. However, customizing these to reflect your brand’s language or positioning is crucial. Generic questions rarely uncover brand-specific insights. Adapt templates to fit your tone, category, and the priorities your team needs to track over time.

Maintain Tracker Wave Consistency

While flexibility is a SurveyMonkey strength, consistency across survey waves is key. Avoid changing core questions between waves unless absolutely necessary, as it disrupts year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter comparability.

That said, you can build some agility in by segmenting your survey into “core” and “rotating” sections. This technique allows you to monitor stable brand equity metrics while exploring new or temporary business questions seasonally.

Leverage SurveyMonkey’s Analysis Capabilities

If you don’t have access to a full analytics team, SurveyMonkey’s results dashboards allow for quick identification of trends. Segment data by demographics, geography, or custom variables to spot shifts more easily. Combine this with trend graphs to visualize long-term movement in brand health indicators.

Remember: even the best brand tracking survey examples only become truly powerful when anchored in strategy and executed with clarity. SurveyMonkey gives you the tools to manage DIY research, but it’s the planning and consistency that pull the insights together – making your tracker a powerful ongoing asset in your market research toolkit.

DIY market research tools like SurveyMonkey have made tracking brand health more accessible than ever – but accessibility doesn’t always mean expertise. Creating a reliable, insights-driven brand tracker still requires deep experience in questionnaire design, sampling strategies, and long-term data integrity. That’s where On Demand Talent provides game-changing value.

Whether your team is just starting to build internal research capabilities or scaling fast with limited support, On Demand Talent offers flexible, expert-level help. These are not freelancers or junior researchers – they’re seasoned consumer insights professionals who understand how to make DIY tools deliver enterprise-level results.

Expert-Led Support. Zero Learning Curve.

Many organizations invest in tools like SurveyMonkey only to discover that scoping the right brand survey or interpreting nuanced data requires more than drag-and-drop features. With On Demand Talent, you tap directly into researchers who have run hundreds of studies across industries – from high-growth startups to global Fortune 500 brands.

These experts can:

• Design thoughtful questionnaires aligned with brand strategy
• Set up longitudinal tracker surveys that maintain data continuity
• Interpret survey results into board-ready insights, not just data points
• Train internal teams to manage their own surveys more effectively

Unlike traditional agencies or freelance researchers, On Demand Talent offers flexible engagement. That means getting exactly the right skill set – for just as long as you need it – whether it’s for a 6-week diagnostic sprint or a full year of ongoing tracker management.

A Smarter Way to Scale Research Without Sacrificing Quality

When you’re building a DIY research program, speed, budget, and control are top priorities – but so is expertise. On Demand Talent removes the tradeoff between capability and capacity. You get top-tier professionals helping you build research muscle inside your organization, without needing to hire full-time or delay timelines.

One fictional brand in the food delivery space, for instance, used On Demand Talent to overhaul their SurveyMonkey brand tracker. Within weeks, they had improved participation rates, streamlined survey logic, and gained clearer insights into where their brand stood compared to local and national competitors – all without adding headcount.

Ultimately, On Demand Talent helps research teams safeguard the most important part of brand tracking: trust in the data. From better survey design to cleaner measurement strategies, these experts ensure your DIY efforts are rigorous, strategic, and built to last.